Elaine Henderson of Garrard County, has been farming crickets for approximately 30 years. She and her late husband opened Henderson Cricket Farm in Florida, but moved their operation to Kentucky five years ago. Photo by Mackenzie Reiss

Elaine Henderson of Garrard County, has been farming crickets for approximately 30 years. She and her late husband opened Henderson Cricket Farm in Florida, but moved their operation to Kentucky five years ago. Photo by Mackenzie Reiss

Henderson and her late husband, Leroy Henderson, operated a cricket farm together on Lake Okeechobee in Florida for about 30 years.

She said she and her husband started the business as a means of getting out of their factory jobs in Fort Lauderdale.

"My husband wanted to grow frogs," she said.

After they got set up for breeding frogs, they went to a worm farm and asked what other sources of food they might get for their amphibious crop. The owner suggested that the couple grow crickets, and he offered to buy all they could grow, Henderson said.

In Florida, the crickets were mainly sold for bait, and the couple eventually had six employees.

"The last year we were in business, we sold 59 million crickets," Elaine Henderson said.

They moved to Kentucky five years ago to be near Leroy Henderson's brother, and a year later started raising crickets again.

"It's just been snowballing since then," Elaine Henderson said.

Last year, she said, the farm brought in $80,000 in gross revenues; profit was $27,500.

But Leroy Henderson died four months ago, and Elaine Henderson, 75, said she's now ready to move on to a new chapter in her life.

She recently began working with a real estate agent to try to sell the business so that can move to Texas to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

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Three times a week, Henderson puts metal baking pans filled with peat moss into a breeder bin.

The female crickets lay eggs in the damp peat, and then Henderson moves the pan into one of 27 large blue plastic totes in "the nursery." Eleven days later, the baby crickets hatch.

Double-sided tape placed around the rims of the totes keep the hatchlings from crawling out, and Henderson keeps egg crates stacked in the totes to give them plenty of surfaces to move around on.

"They have to have crawl space or they'll pile up," she said. "They're a creature that if they feel crowded, they die out."

Henderson keeps the nursery a toasty 93 degrees.

"Just like normal babies, they have to be warm," she said.

On the coldest days of winter, she gets up as early as 4 a.m. to put logs into the outdoor wood stove she uses to heat the building where she raises the crickets with the help of one part-time employee.